U.S. electric power source projections: solar still most by 2023

According to FERC’s own figures from 2012 and 2016,
my solar projections from 2013 (and former FERC Chair Jon Wellinghoff’s) were pretty good,
and more U.S. electricity will still come from solar power by 2023.
Since coal and nuclear are already crashing, and natural gas isn’t
increasing even as fast as formerly projected, solar could win even faster.

I constructed
table below from the 2012 and 2016 summaries of total U.S. electric
power generation from all sources, by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

Look at the 2012 column:
only coal and natural gas generated more than 25% of total U.S. electricity.

But in 2016 it’s only natural gas, because coal’s growth rate actually
turned negative: utilities are shutting down coal plants, not building them.
Back in 2013 I did not predict that to happen so quickly.

Now look at
the growth rates,
both
my 2013 projections (see also the graph on the right) and my corrected 2017 projections.
Only wind (and waste heat) is higher than 5%, plus solar alone at more than 50%
new installed capacity per year.
According to FERC’s 2016 figures (the “actual:” numbers in the 2016 columns),
my 2013 solar projection was a little high by deployed utility-scale solar power,
but was actually low as a proportion in 2016, because coal and nuclear are already crashing.
Sure, one new nuclear power plant opened in 2016, but more than one closed.

And remember, utility-scale solar power, which is all FERC records in its Energy Infrastructure Updates,
isn’t the whole story.
FERC recorded 7.748 GW of new solar power in 2016,
but SEIA added in rooftop and community solar power for a total of 14.6 GW
of new solar power in 2016.

You don’t see rooftop coal, or nuclear, or natural gas.
You don’t any of those installed in 9-month or less timeframes, as for solar power: they all require multi-year permitting processes because they’re so
environmentally destructive.
So it’s very unlikely there are any significant additions to coal, nuclear, or
natural gas U.S. energy generation beyond what FERC reported.

Solar power has what we could call the personal computer or mobile phone advantage:
anybody can own one.
Practically by definition, you’ll never see that advantage for utility-scale
power generation.

Looking that the 2021 and 2023 projections in the
table,
of course they’re naive projections, simply taking the old 2013
rate and the new 2017 corrected rate and projecting them forward.
The 2013 rate I made by comparing FERC’s 2012 total figures to previous years.
The 2017 rate I made by comparing FERC’s 2016 total figures to its 2012 total figures.

By 2021 coal won’t even account for 25% of U.S. electricity generation,
and it didn’t even in FERC’s actual 2016 figures.
In 2021 natural gas will account for a higher proportion because of coal’s
capitulation,
even though it’s actually growing slower than my 2013 projection.

Also in 2021, solar and wind will both be greater than 10% of U.S. generation,
although wind will not yet reach that by the corrected projection.
Since in 2016 according to SEIA solar actually beat wind for new installed
capacity, I wonder if wind is already having trouble competing with solar power.

In 2023, by either my old or new projections, solar power will generate
more U.S. electricity than anything else.
Wind doesn’t grow nearly as fast by the corrected 2017 factor.
Maybe 2016 was a glitch for wind, or maybe there’s something deeper going on.

For how naive these projections are, look at the Total row.
U.S. electricty demand is unlikely to increase by 20% by 2021
(only four years from now) and it’s even less likely to increase by
52% by 2023 (only seven years from now).
What that actually probably means is that coal and nuclear will crash faster
and natural gas will follow them down, leaving solar and wind power as the
main sources of U.S. electricity.

What is the mysterious Waste Heat that FERC does not define in either
of the source reports?
EPA
defines it like this:

Waste heat to power (WHP) is the process of capturing heat discarded
by an existing industrial process and using that heat to generate
power (see Figure 1). Energy-intensive industrial
processes—such as those occurring at refineries, steel mills,
glass furnaces, and cement kilns—all release hot exhaust gases
and waste streams that can be harnessed with well-established
technologies to generate electricity (see Appendix). The recovery of
industrial waste heat for power is a largely untapped type of
combined heat and power (CHP), which is the use of a single fuel
source to generate both thermal energy (heating or cooling) and
electricity.

So waste heat is efficiency measures for existing thermal industrial processes.
Thus it is unlikely ever to account for a significant proportion of electricty
generation.

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